Embassy-Of-China.com

There are over 40 million overseas Chinese, mostly living in Southeast Asia where they make up a majority of the population of Singapore and significant minority populations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The overseas populations in those areas arrived between the 16th and 19th centuries mostly from the maritime provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, followed by Hainan. There were incidences of earlier emigration from the 10th to 15th centuries in particular to Malacca and Southeast Asia.
Overseas Chinese are people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside the Greater China region, which includes territories administered by the rival governments of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC). People of partial Chinese ancestry may also consider themselves Overseas Chinese. A vast majority of the overseas Chinese hail from only three coastal provinces of the mainland viz. Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan[1] - the homelands of Yao, Zhuang, She and Li. The term Overseas Chinese is ambiguous and inconsistent as to whether it can refer to any of the ethnic groups that live in China (the broadly defined Zhonghua minzu) or whether it refers specifically to the Han Chinese ethnicity, narrowly defined. Korean minorities from China who are living in South Korea today are often included in calculations of overseas Chinese, because ethnic Koreans may also identify themselves as part of the Chinese nation. In Southeast Asia and particularly in Malaysia and Singapore, the state classifies the Peranakan as Chinese despite partial assimilation into Malay culture. Conversely, Mongols living in or having emigrated from Mongolia are universally not considered to be overseas Chinese despite the fact that ethnic Mongols living in Inner Mongolia are considered one of the nationalities of the People's Republic of China. One study on overseas Chinese defines several criteria for identifying non-Han overseas Chinese: there is evidence of descent from groups living within or originating from China, they still retain their culture, self-identify with Chinese culture or acknowledge Chinese origin, although they are not categorized as ethnic Han Chinese. Under this definition, "ethnic minority" overseas Chinese number about 7 million, or about 8.4% of the total overseas population.